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Did you know that a recent study done by Hubspot revealed that lead nurturing helps companies achieve 50% more sales at 33% lower cost?

And that's not all. Lead nurturing also helps businesses build trust and relationship with their audience, accelerate their sales pipeline, and increase their average deal value.  

But while lead nurturing programs might seem easy and straightforward on the surface, there’s more to them than just getting yourself some contacts and sending out valuable content on a regular basis. 

That’s why we interviewed Samantha Stone and decided to share with you in this newsletter, the art and science of lead nurturing. 

Specifically, you'll learn:  

1. Some misconceptions about lead nurturing
2. The step-by-step guide to planning and setting up a lead nurturing program
3. The pitfalls you should keep an eye out for 
4. How to define the different types of content that should be used in every stage of the journey? 
5. Some tools for setting up a lead nurturing program

Let’s dive in. 

Some misconceptions about lead nurturing 

One of the myths that need to be bust out there is that lead nurturing equals email marketing. Many people think that lead nurturing is some kind of email autoresponder sequence, which is wrong. 

While email is a fundamental tool and an important aspect of lead nurturing, it is no more or less than one of the tools that you have available to you. 

What you really need to do when you’re building lead nurturing programs is to think about all the ways you can engage and build a relationship with someone over time.

You can leverage: 

• e-mails, 
• events, 
• interactions with the sales team, 
• targeted advertising, and all kinds of communications. 

Lead nurturing comes down to something that's very simple. It’s the first time that someone responds to you, interacts with you, raises their hand, and says, “Yes, please communicate with me”. That could be via a form, a meeting at an event, or some other mechanism. 

Then you have the opportunity to build on that relationship over time. Mind you, oftentimes that relationship might extend for several weeks, months, and even years before the lead turns into an actual opportunity. 

And so you as a marketer need to think about how you're going to add value to that relationship during that period of time. Think about the different ways in which you are going to communicate with that individual person, stay in touch with them, and keep top of mind. Fundamentally, that is what lead nurturing should be. 

What is the step-by-step guide to planning and setting up a lead nurturing program? 

Sometimes we’re so eager to put something in place that we jump into a lead nurturing program and treat every lead the exact same way. As a result, we land no deal. 

To help you avoid such a fiasco, we’ll share with you the 4 steps that we learned from Samantha. 

Step 1: Segment all your leads by their job role and group them by the stage of the customer journey they’re in  

Before you start figuring out the content you want to share with your contacts, the very first thing you need to do is to think about the database of people in your community that you're going to nurture. 

And then, group those people by their role. Think about the people and groups of people by their function at the organizations they serve. 

Afterward, think about the stage of the buying process they’re in:

• awareness stage
• consideration stage
• decision stage

This is important in the sense that contacts at each stage need different types of content. So, you shouldn't just assume everybody is in the awareness stage. Instead, you should look at the type of content they have consumed and that can give you a signal about where they might be in their buying journey.

For example, if someone downloads an RFP template of your website, that probably signals that they're fairly advanced in their purchasing journey. But if they download a paper that's called 10 trends in account-based marketing, that may not signal that they’re very far in their journey.

They may be very early, still trying to identify if ABM is a good fit for them or not.

That said, make sure you have tried to read the signals based on the interaction you've had so far with that individual and determine what strings they belong to. 

Furthermore, it is of paramount importance that you have multiple lead nurturing cadences. That could be 5 or 10 if you have a very diverse base of customers that you serve. But you're going to determine that based on the roles you're communicating with and the stage of the buying process they’re in. 

Step 2: Audit all the content you have at hand and identify priority gaps  

You may have things in your customer knowledge base that you can leverage. This can be:

• blog posts,
• ebooks,
• white papers,
• video libraries, and
• your upcoming webinars. 

Make sure that you have all the different content available to you and a list of all the events and campaigns you're going to be running over the next several weeks or months. Then use what you already have to develop a cadence and regular set of communication that's going to take multiple weeks or months. 

In case you do not have everything you need right now, it’s still okay. Get started with what you have at hand and then identify priority gaps that you can start filling over time. 

Step 3: Communication channels to nurture your leads 

Think about all the channels you want to leverage in your nurturing campaign. This can be :

• emails, 
• events, 
• ad retargeting,
• direct mail, 
• sales team communication.

Train your sales team to communicate and collect information. Then put together actual strings and timing of communications. At this point, you might want to create a campaign brief for each of those nurturing strings that’s really clear about who is going to get these particular strings. What is the content that you are going to share with them? At what time frames and through what channels? And then you can start scheduling activities to meet that. 

Step 4: Be ready to start. You won't have a perfect program right off the bat

Keep in mind that you'll not get everything perfect right from the get-go. You’re going to learn as you go, and that’s what marketing is.

What you can do is build mechanisms into your program to track not only things like open rates or registration rates but also track the number of days that individuals are spending in each stage of the buying process with you. 

What are the pitfalls you should keep an eye out for? 

One of the big mistakes most people make is focusing on the metrics that are easy to measure. This includes: 

• the email open rate; 
• the click-through rate of a particular piece of content; 
• the conversion rate for invitations to register to an event; 
• etc. 

While it is not a bad thing to understand and refine those metrics, focusing only on them might take you far from the ultimate goal which is to actually drive the business forward and help these individuals and their companies make a decision about purchasing your product or service. 

That said, lead nurturing should be all about driving a purchase decision. 

So, ensure that you’re measuring also the things that are difficult, including: 

• the impact that your campaign is having on the stage of the buying process, 
• the number of opportunities, 
• your win rate within those opportunities. 

In a nutshell, you really need to measure lead nurturing not just by the campaign component, but by the overall effect it has on your ability to drive your business and to drive growth. Too often we don't do that. 

How to define the different types of content that should be used in every stage of the journey? 

Some things are obvious. For example, if you’re trying to attract or serve people who are in the later stage of the buying process where they're comparing one provider to another, these types of content will be gold:

• buyers guide, 
• checklist, 
• vendor questionnaires, and 
• RFP template. 

These are the types of content that can make it easy for them to do their comparisons. 

But there are some other things that are not so obvious and you’ll only learn them by experimenting and talking to buyers. 

Samantha has a technique that she uses when she interviews folks, and it seems to be rather helpful in discerning this. 

In every conversation she has with a prospective buyer or current customer, she begins with a content question. She can create 10 titles of content, and it doesn't matter if it's going to end up being a video, a white paper, or a webpage. 

What matters is what the title of that content could be. Then she asks the buyers to rate how compelled they would be while going through that content. She usually asks them to do it on a 0 to 5 scale (0 means not at all, and 5 means they will drop what they're doing right now to go and consume that content).

This helps Samantha understand what is compelling to that person and then she maps what she knows about that individual and where they are in their process, who else in their company might be interested and she follows up with some of those qualitative questions. 

The second thing to do is to share your content with your intended audience before publication. While it is true that most companies have an internal content review process, the most important audience (which is the person we hope is going to consume that content once it is published) is never consulted to provide feedback. 

So basically, you can go to someone who represents the audience that you want to promote your content to and ask them directly for feedback. Sometimes that could be 1 or 2 people. 

But even in that small sample size, you will find tremendous value. And that extra step makes a very big difference in the effectiveness of the content when you start using it in your nurturing programs. 

Some tools for setting up a lead nurturing program

There are so many tools out there that you can use during lead nurturing campaigns. And the choice of the right tool for you is pretty much an individual decision. 

However, what you should keep in mind is that technology should never be an obstacle to moving forward and running a lead nurturing program. In her early beginning, Samantha ran lead nurturing programs with Google Sheets, Excel spreadsheets, and lots of sticky notes. 

But some tools you can leverage would be:

• Marketo 
• Hubspot
• Terminus   
• Engagio

Basically, the tools you need will depend on your budget and a whole bunch of factors related to specific lead nurturing programs. Also, how much scale you need will determine the technology that you will use. 

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